The rush of the mush

The Iditarod, a gruelling 1,150-mile race across Alaska, is one of the world’s great adventures - even if you are a spectator. Imogen Stubbs, following the dogs by light plane, had a dangerous, weird and life-changing time in 'The Big Lonely'.

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Actress Imogen Stubbs on her Alaskan adventure

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Imogen travelled in a light aircraft across Alaska with pilot Paul Klauss

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A sleepy sled-dog

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Imogen with the trail-breakers who travel on snowmobiles to break the trail for the Iditarod racers

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Imogen in her snowmobile: 'petrified, I just crashed from tree to tree'

12:01AM GMT 14 Jan 2006

We were crossing the arctic wilderness of Alaska in a light aircraft when a white-out blizzard struck. It rapidly became impossible to tell which whiteness was sky and which the frozen Bering Sea - home to polar bears and, even in March, minus-minus temperatures.

A few hours earlier, in an Eskimo village, the four of us had breakfasted on reindeer sausages with a group of people travelling by helicopter. Now, with our headphones, we could hear urgent messages crackling through to our pilot. Anyone airborne should get out of the blizzard by whatever means possible. We should land immediately. Anywhere. Nome Airport, our destination, was closed... the helicopter had crashed.

Peering through the windows, we saw to our horror that a layer of ice was forming on the wings. And then the engine cut out. Silence. Seconds ticked by, feeling like forever. We were speechless with fear. Then the noise kicked in again. "Sorry about that, folks," said Paul, the pilot, calmly explaining we had run out of petrol and it had taken a minute for the reserve tank to take over.

With the instruments useless in the whiteness, he took the plane incredibly low, searching for anything not white.

He nosed his way along a valley and brought us down on a frozen river. We stumbled out of the plane to find an Eskimo village a few hundred yards away. It was called White Mountain.

Reeling from the most nerve-wracking experience I would care to imagine, I asked myself what on earth had possessed me to follow the Iditarod dog race across more than a thousand miles of desolate frozen wilderness in "The Big Lonely"?

I had been to Alaska in the summer and fallen in love with the vastness of the place and the crazy story-telling end-of-the-roaders who seem to wind up there. I had gone camping with a kayak and caught two 34lb salmon - only to be shot at by some deranged whitewater rafters. I had terrifying encounters with bears and stayed in a lodge where, just after I left, my hosts were arrested on embezzlement charges by armed police descending in helicopters.

I also met Paul Claus, the pilot, and his wife, Donna, and stayed at their home, Ultima Thule. The name means "remote beyond reckoning" and the lodge is 300 miles by air from anywhere else. This isn't a problem because Paul is an incredible bush-pilot and can land on anything from a glacier to the edge of a cliff.

They invited me to come back in winter and fly with Paul alongside the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Every year, in early March, more than 80 mushers and their 16-dog teams set off on a 1,150-mile odyssey. They leave Anchorage, ascend the Alaska range, descend to the cryogenic basin of the Yukon River, cross to the Bering Sea coast, battle across the treeless tundra of western Alaska, cross the frozen ocean ice and arrive nine days to three weeks later at the old gold-rush boom town of Nome.

I have never been particularly interested in sled-dogs. But Alaska gets into your system and you can't quite shake it off. It is unlike anywhere else I've ever been - friendly, dangerous, weird and life-changing.

I wanted to see the place at its most extreme. From the moment I decided to go, however, I felt irresponsible towards my children. I wasn't sure if I was psychologically prepared. Never does one love one's family - or bathrooms, radiators and colours - more than before a trip somewhere cold and white. I'm sure Ranulph Fiennes would back me up here.

I arrived in Anchorage, clad in every sort of fleece, and met my travelling companions: Paul, Bud, a businessman from Arkansas, and Lisa, a Norwegian log-truck driver.

We joined the crowds for the opening Iditarod parade, which was wonderfully good-natured. The mushers are real stars in Alaska. They can also be nuts - one girl doing the race was blind, another had cancer and a four-time champion, Martin Buser, had chopped off his finger with a chainsaw three days earlier. The race is unbelievably gruelling. In temperatures that fall to -50F (-46C) the mushers are responsible for 66 legs in perilous conditions - there are wolf attacks, people fall through the ice, get lost, get hypothermia, the dogs' faces freeze up...

All the eccentrics were out: a man wearing a wolf-head, an elderly woman dressed as Cinderella sharing a cigarette with an inebriated giant moose. The highlight for me was when a woman sang the American national anthem and was drowned out by 1,120 dogs singing along.

In the afternoon we went for a ride in a dog-sleigh with a musher. This has to be one of the loveliest ways of travelling - all snuggled up in a blanket gliding through the snow. It's probably the nearest one gets to being in a pushchair again; I was tempted to demand juice and throw my gloves out. The dogs go really fast so it takes great skill to stop the sleigh tipping over. If it does tip, you have to hang on or the dogs may disappear for good.

After the big send-off in Anchorage, the race proper starts 60 miles to the north. We camped on a frozen lake surrounded by mountains and the plane's wheels got stuck in snow, which required a lot of digging and praying. The plane becomes a fellow traveller on whom you depend utterly.

We learnt to set up camp quickly - understanding that our lives could depend on efficient teamwork. At about -10F (-23C), chopping wood to tether the tents and getting them up took an hour and a half; if the temperature had fallen to -30F (-34C), we might never have managed it.

That evening we sat in sunshine on turquoise ice, smoking roll-ups and playing poker until the sun set over the mountains and the stars came out, and with them the Northern Lights dancing their wonderful amorphous dance. We ate chocolate brownies, drank coffee and then went to bed. By then it was seriously cold and my teeth seemed to freeze as I tried to brush them. Going to the loo was worse, with the threat of meeting a moose, and wolverines howling in the distance.

Paul and Bud had a hot stove and food in their tent; I had a chain-smoking Norwegian with a headache and very little English.

Once inside the survival sleeping bag I was warm enough, but as I listened to a cracking sound I realised we were sleeping over a frozen lake that was thawing.

At dawn we lifted our tent flap to see 16 panting, frosty-faced dogs and their Norwegian musher glide past within a few feet. For the next few hours team after team went past. We packed up and flew to Takotna (population: 100), where the elderly mayor met us on his snowmobile. A wonderful character, he had rescued the village from appalling alchoholism and made it a thriving community.

Paul and the mayor caught up on recent news over spaghetti bolognaise. Paul told him how, a month earlier, his entire homestead had burned down; the mayor talked of getting mauled by a bear and going to prison for killing a moose off-season. The greater the disaster, the better the chat.

Susan Butcher joined us. She has won the Iditarod race four times and is a total star. Bud had worshipped her for years and was speechless with excitement.

We went for a long hike and ended up on an airstrip. There was a huge salmon in a black plastic wrapper lying on the runway. It had an address and note attached: "Dear Jan, Sorry about... you know, love Sandra."

Next stop was Iditarod. It was once a gold-mining town and home to 15,000 people. Now it's a ghost town.

We had gone from two to five in our tiny tent: Lisa, me, Susan Butcher and her daughter, Tekna, and Kathy Buser, the wife of Martin with the chainsawed finger. I no longer dared show indifference to the race or who won. Everyone dropped by to talk dog because ours were the star tents... Kathy told us that her freezer contained Martin's favourite, but sadly deceased, lead-dog. In among the choc-ices. It is a strong bond.

During the night the race passed us - a case of "Here come... there go the dogs!" The next day Paul and I went skiing. We encountered a man cycling on snow from Anchorage to Nome. He turned out to be from Guildford. We had a nice chat about the new Waitrose and he wobbled off.

I ended up skiing up and down a tree-covered mountain in deep powder snow. Paul said he would teach me survival skiing but then he disappeared. Petrified, I just crashed from tree to tree. Until I fell at his feet at the bottom. "Thanks a bunch," I said. "Well, you survived," he replied.